A Breitbart.com columnist launched a transphobic attack on transgender former Army Private Chelsea Manning, calling her a “traitorous transsexual” and asking if the government had “cut it off yet.”

In a September 16 column for Breitbart London, columnist Milo Yiannopoulos attacked Manning - who was convicted in 2013 of leaking classified documents to Wikileaks - for publishing an op-ed in The Guardian about the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL). Yiannopoulos repeatedly misgendered Manning, asking if the government had “cut it off yet” - referring to Manning's genitalia:

Have they cut it off yet? The penis attached to traitorous transsexual Chelsea Manning, I mean. How else to explain the level of feverish disturbance necessary for the former Private Bradley to pen an op-ed saying we should “let ISIS succeed” in its mission to destroy half the Middle East, murdering, raping and torturing anyone in its way.

[...]

Manning, is of course, suffering from a lamentable psychiatric disorder. Normally, we help people like that by giving them access to doctors and drugs.

[...]

I don't believe everything the government tells me, and I know it snoops on me more than it should, but do I trust the NSA more than I trust a loopy alleged rapist, Putin's bitch or a psychologically fragile, gender-bending convicted traitor? You bet I do. [emphasis added]

Yiannopoulos also linked to a personal blog post in which he called “transgenderism” a “disease” and suggested that some transgender women are just “marginalised, lonely” gay men crying for help.

It goes without saying that Yiannopoulos' transphobic screed contradicts expert consensus, which has acknowledged transgender identities as "part of the human condition." He relies on the discredited work of former Johns Hopkins Hospital psychiatrist Paul McHugh, ignoring current professional medical recommendations about the transgender community.

Pseudoscience aside, though, Yiannopoulos' column is a stark example of the kind of gratuitous hate speech Breitbart.com is willing to publish. Manning's Guardian op-ed had nothing to do with being transgender, but Breitbart couldn't pass up another opportunity to depict transgender people as unstable or deviant.